“Mail Order Monsters” is a group exhibition curated by Kathy Grayson that explores new trends in fucked-up figuration. Every generation has its unique take on the figure, and the most exciting new art seems to portray the figure as broken, decaying, fractured, and monstrous! Each artist in this exhibition exemplifies this pervasive tendency in a unique way.
Francine Spiegel’s soupy, sloppy women are engulfed by Pop slime piles. Rappers’ girlfriends, socialites, and pinup girls are all thrown into the stew of Mylar, goo, glitter, and chewing gum.

The work of Antwerp native Dennis Tyfus comes out of graffiti and underground art and music in Europe and America. The monsters that inhabit his hectic drawings are rude, humiliating, drunk, and aggressive.
Ben Jones, a member of East Coast art collective Paper Rad, takes neon and comics to new oddities of meaning. With the hand style of the best graffiti artist and the conceptual, absurd rigor of a Dadaist, his paintings, sculptures, and comics take a fresh look at figuration.

Tomoo Gokita favors creepy portraits of women and wrestlers, executed exclusively in black and white. Their faces occasionally escape his brush unscathed but more often they are tangled into knots, overwhelmed by abstract, machinelike forms, or obliterated in one big gesture.

Eddie Martinez loves men in hats, potted plants, parrots, and patterns. Drawing with paint, and often hastily, he configures ambiguous scenes of interaction, played out equally between barely held-together figures and the inanimate objects that decorate their interiors.

Taylor McKimens’s monsters are not terribly otherworldly or fantastical but are rather the folks next door, down the street, or on the wrong side of the tracks. Deadbeats and derelicts roam sparse, harshly lit worlds of soggy bread and Band-Aids, bologna and knotted garden hose.

Joe Grillo is a member of Virginia Beach art collective Dearraindrop and has been putting the figure through the pop media shredder for years with very hyperreal results. Winking, jabbering, and hieroglyphic, Joe’s horror vacui paintings and drawings are an uneasy dream squeezed full of monsters and American archetypes.

Takeshi Murata’s videos are seething masses of data distortion and fractured figuration. Humans, monkeys, and monsters slog through and come apart in a beautiful, complex pattern of disrupted video. By hacking the way a computer reads a DVD, Takeshi is able to painstakingly create, frame by frame, an image of both painterly abstraction and technological fragmentation.